Mario Draghi, European Central Bank president, has revived the idea of “reform contracts” — a policy that emerged in Brussels wonk circles last year and entails the EU contractually binding eurozone countries to economic reforms.

Search the pockets, wallets, purses, car cigarette ashtrays and homes of anyone in (almost) any eurozone country and you are likely to find significant heaps of small, brown iron-and-copper 1 and 2 euro cent coins.

They cost more to make than they are worth, there’s precious little you can buy with them (though the German post office does sell a €0.03 stamp) and they tend to accumulate in drawers and on flat surfaces at an alarming rate. So, one might reasonably ask, why not just get rid of them? Read more

A few months’-worth of good data do not a recovery make. However, better-than-expected news since the turn of the year has given Bank of England’s economists cause for optimism, which they duly factored into the latest growth forecasts.

Not so their counterparts at the European Commission.

While the Monetary Policy Committee has raised its 2012 growth estimates in recent months amid signs of a nascent recovery, in a more-or-less uniformly grim forecast of the economic outlook for Europe, the Commission on Thursday left its estimate for the UK, last recorded in November, at 0.6 per cent. Read more

Greece’s fiscal problems are huge, but have been amplified because nobody can trust the numbers it produces. A European Commission report just released on the Greek statistical service is as damning you can imagine a Brussels institution preparing. It reveals how figures on the country’s public finances have been persistently mis-reported since before Greece join the eurozone in 2001 – a step it would never have been allowed to take if what is known now was known then.

Perhaps this offers part of an answer to the question of why Greece is such a big deal to the eurozone when the problems of California - a much bigger economy – are not of such existential importance to the US (see my earlier post). Athens has created such bad feeling in Brussels and at the ECB in Frankfurt, and the sense that nobody really knows what is going on with the Greek economy – except that it is bad. Read more

How the crisis might have saved the euro: Ralph Atkins reads between the lines of the European Commission’s forecasts and discovers the credit crisis has helped to correct some significant pre-crisis current account imbalances Read more

Archived - Money Supply

Economics blog

About this blog

Blog guide

Welcome. If you have yet to register on FT.com you will be asked to do so before you begin to read FT blogs. However, our posts remain free.

Opinions on market-moving economics and central banks around the world.

The Money Supply team

Chris Giles has been the economics editor of the Financial Times since 2004. Based in London, he writes about international economic trends and the British economy. Before reporting economics for the Financial Times, he wrote editorials for the paper, reported for the BBC, worked as a regulator of the broadcasting industry and undertook research for the Institute for Fiscal Studies. RSS

Claire Jones is the FT's Eurozone economy correspondent, based in Frankfurt. Prior to this, she was an economics reporter in London. Before joining the Financial Times, she was the editor of the Central Banking journal. Claire studied philosophy and economics at the London School of Economics. RSS

Robin Harding is the FT's US economics editor, based in Washington. Prior to this, he was based in Tokyo, covering the Bank of Japan and Japan's technology sector, and in London as an economics leader writer. Robin studied economics at Cambridge and has a masters in economics from Hitotsubashi University, where he was a Monbusho scholar. Before joining the FT, Robin worked in asset management and banking. RSS

Sarah O’Connor is the FT’s economics correspondent in London. Before that, she was a Lex writer, covered the US economy from Washington and the Icelandic banking collapse from Reykjavik. Sarah studied Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge University and joined the FT in 2007. RSS

Ferdinando Giugliano is the FT's global economy news editor, based in London. Ferdinando holds a doctorate in economics from Oxford University, where he was also a lecturer, and has worked as a consultant for the Bank of Italy, the Economist Intelligence Unit and Oxera. He joined the FT in 2011 as a leader writer. RSS

Emily Cadman is an economics reporter at the FT, based in London. Prior to this, she worked as a data journalist and was head of interactive news at the Financial Times. She joined the FT in 2010, after working as a web editor at a variety of news organisations.
RSS

Ralph Atkins, capital markets editor, has been writing for the Financial Times for more than 20 years following an economics degree from Cambridge. From 2004 to 2012, Ralph was Frankfurt bureau chief, watching the European Central Bank and eurozone economies. He has also worked in Bonn, Berlin, Jerusalem and Brussels. RSS

Ben McLannahan covers markets and economics for the FT from Tokyo, and before that he wrote Lex notes from London and Hong Kong. He studied English at Cambridge University and joined the FT in 2007, after stints at the Economist Group and Institutional Investor. RSS